The character of Ben in 10 Forward, in his mannerisms and how he acts, seems a whole lot like Guinan.

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The lines were originally written for Guinan, but Whoopi was suddenly unavailable.

There was an intention, in the early planning of DS9, that Guinan's son might be imprisoned there, this giving the writers an opening to use Guinan on that series. Ultimately, they ended up with Martus Mazar, who used his El-Aurian talents (and canonizing the name of Guinan's species) to cheat at Quark's.

I was just watching TNG "Lower Decks on BBC America (why is it on BBC America? One Brit qualifies a series?).

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Marina Sirtis also has British ancestry.

I remember an interview she did, and talked about the London premiere of one of the TNG films that the Queen attended, where she & Patrick Stewart had to bow/curtsy or whatever to her out of respect & such.

This was a very successful character and was well played by Bruce Beatty. I would have liked to see more of this character... but he was introduced ten episodes before the end of the series, so there was no time left...

Really? Wouldn't that partly defeat the purpose of the episode? Ben, like the rest of them, was a 'lower decks' character. Isn't that the point of all this?

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It wasn't the original point. The point was for Guinan to do her usual listening-to-problems shtick. When Whoopi was unavailable, the writers decided to add one more "lower decks" character to the mix, thus strengthening the script's theme.

I believe this anecdote is reported in the Asherman "TNG Companion", but I heard it from Richard Arnold at an Aussie convention before that edition came out.

That would have been an interesting move indeed, but it wasn't what was planned. As some have said, the TNG Companion says that he was shoehorned in when Whoopi wasn't available.

However, the DS9 producers did originally conceive Martus Mazur from the episode Rivals to be Guinan's wayward son, but this was lost during production. They wanted him to be a recurring character, but the episode was a stinker so he was quietly dropped.